


The Demon and the Glasses

by ShadeShadow234



Category: Gintama
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe, Blood and Violence, Death, Drinking, Gen, Joui War, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, damn this is actually kinda dark, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 06:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15504651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadeShadow234/pseuds/ShadeShadow234
Summary: Five(ish) times Shinpachi encounters the Shiroyasha, and one time he meets Gintoki.Or, Shinpachi is young to fight in the Joui war, but not the youngest, and war ages those it can sink it’s talons into faster than time itself.





	The Demon and the Glasses

**Author's Note:**

> Another gintama fic. Finishing wips? Never heard of her. Also hey, look who suddenly came back from the dead! Me!

**One**

The pommel of the blade is sweaty in his grip, and he has to take a moment to wipe his palms. A sweaty grip meant a slippery grip, and a slippery grip was a bad one. One that didn’t guarantee the next time your sword clashed with one of rebels that it would hold up.

Hajime-nii taught him that.

The ground squished lightly underfoot, and Shinpachi has to remove his morals from the situation, forget that it’s human blood staining his boots and human blood making the dirt into mud. If he doesn’t then he’ll vomit for sure, and leave his back open to the sky for that imperative second that could earn him a sword in his back.

The sky is overcast, and he is glad for that small mercy. If the sun were shining, it would worsen that rotted scent, and illuminate all the dark details. It’s bad enough as it is.

He stumbles around what might have once been the head of a lizard like Amanto, blown to shreds now, and shudders at the violence of the Jouishishi. He steps over a corpse with its throat ripped out and eyes pecked at and wonders if his side is much better.

When he was a boy, he had wanted to hold a real steel blade, because all the samurai held blades and made dramatic speeches and won. Holding the blade, perhaps, wasn’t the worst part. What was the worst was the feeling of skin and muscle splitting cleanly, shining bone being revealed in a spray or red— but the fight was over for today, and those dark thoughts were for long nights spent alone, no anue-ue to help him sleep, just the muffled groans and shouts of the men around him.

Shinpachi is seventeen, and he’s already had a peek into the worst Earth has to offer.

Now he stands in the middle of a battlefield, corpses rotting at his feet, and looks for survivors.

An elephant Amanto to his left shifts, and Shinpachi is quick to make his way over. It’s belly is carved out, almost as if from behind, but that’s impossible because it’s skin is too thick for blades to penetrate. It shifts again, and Shinpachi swallows bile in favour of calling out.

“Hold on, I’ll get this off of you!” He says, and hopes it’s someone on his side so he doesn’t have to add another to his body count.

Wedging his scabbard under the heavy body, he uses it like a lever, and just manages to roll the Amanto over before loosing his grip. There’s a relatively squished looking man underneath, who closes his eyes to take in fresh air as Shinpachi pants next him. It’s a heavy Amanto, being trapped underneath one sounds like less fun than eating Anue-ue’s cooking, almost.

“Oi, oi, care to give an injured person a hand up?” The man requests, and Shinpachi takes a moment to revaluate the situation, and finds himself hating the Joui all the more for it. That’s the voice of someone who can’t be much older than him, and he’s been dragged into this war. (And isn’t there irony in that, or maybe it’s because he can see himself in the curve of the mans cheeks, in the voice of someone not quite out of puberty)

“Yes, yes, sorry, of course.” Shinpachi replies, and holds one hand out to the ma- soldier.

Pulling him free from the green-tinted mud is easier said than done, and the soldier hacks up a mouthful of blood, evidently not his own by its green shade. That turns Shinpachis stomach, but he still doesn’t know which side this man is on and he cant afford to feel ill.

“You have a good poker face,” he remarks, wiping a little green from where it trailed down his lip, “but your hands are too sweaty. How long have you been fighting?”

The man speaks like he’s older than Shinpachi, by a decade, but the war ages people and it ages them fast, and by all means he’s likely been fighting for far longer than Shinpachi himself has. “This is my first year.”

“God, it’s been a year?” The soldiers clothing is stained red and brown and green, and Shinpachi wonders what colour it might have once been. Not that that matters much, but there’s novelty in the little things, like pretending a bloodstained uniform can be washed and restored and not set to burn with the bodies.

“How long have you been fighting?” Shinpachi asks, bending to pick up his scabbard and sliding the blade out an inch, pretending not to notice how fast the soldiers hands fly to his own. It seems everyone is a little uncertain of alliance. The blade is undamaged and he slides it back in, looping it through his belt and watching as the soldier opposite to him relaxes.

A bitter laugh sounds, short and sharp, and the man runs a hand through clumped and matted hair, which, much like his clothes, is stained with blood. “Hell if I know. Ask Zura if you really want to know, he’s the one that keeps track of those sort of things.”

“Zura?”

“Ah, never mind. Hell of a lot longer than a year, I know that much.” The soldier reaches over and pats Shinpachi on the shoulder, leaving a bloody handprint, and then takes a step back. “Well, thanks for helping me out. Here’s hoping we never meet again.”

Shinpachi blinks at the odd farewell, opens his mouth, but then shuts it and watches the man go. He’s looking for survivors, prodding around with his scabbard. As soon as he is gone from view, around a gruesome stack of Amanto and human alike, Shinpachi takes one last look at the elephant Amantos back.

It’s been carved out, undoubtedly with a blade, and Shinpachi worries about what he just released.

 

**Two**

 

Three weeks later, full of hard battles, some won and some lost, the Shogunate sends a new contingent their way. It’s full of pasty people, all of them carrying umbrellas and hiding from the sun and there’s jokes about the government sending them the ill because hell, they’re all dying anyways, but then they tear through an entire squadron of the Jouishishi and the Yato become well known as monsters.

Around that time, Shinpachi meets a girl. She has orange hair and blue eyes and wears bright red as if trying to draw enemy attention. Her name is Kagura and she’s an absolute brat, and Shinpachi wonders why she’s here, on this battlefield, being forced to kill over and over and over.

They become friends, of a sort, as good as friends any one dares to be on the battlefield because your next breath could be your last and Shinpachi doesn’t dare do that to her, because of the two of them he is the weaker and he’s the one clinging to any last vestiges of hope while she’s already flung them to the abyss, so she can stand and laugh in the face of death where Shinpachi just tries not to cry.

On a night where neither of them can sleep, strung high from battle, Shinpachi tells her of the strange man he had unearthed, hidden under the impossibly carved Amanto, and Kagura laughs.

“Maybe he was some sort of demon, uh huh.”

“Don’t joke about things like that, Kagura-chan! The Jouishishi supposedly have some sort of demon on their side,” Shinpachi said, and ignored the shiver that ran up his spine at the thought.

“Demon or no demon, I’ll beat em up either way!”

Yes, Kagura had long since cast any hope into the abyss.

Shinpachi bites his lip, stares at the ceiling, and tries not to think of home or blood red eyes.

He doesn’t succeed.

 

**Three**

 

The next battle is a tough one, a long one, and Shinpachi has been on and off fighting for a week before Kagura finds him again. The Joui are making further advances, and somehow, against all odds, they’re succeeding. They’ve forgone the stealth of attacking at night, instead pushing hardest on days where the sun is high and hot in the sky, and even then avoiding the Yato the best they can.

Shinpachi is at one of the furthest edges of the battlefield, where the battle isn’t as wild as it could be, but even then he’s suffered his fair share of wounds. Kagura leaps down from somewhere, perhaps a nearby tree but the closest is twenty feet away and Shinpachi has to remind himself that she’s a Yato just in time for her umbrella to pop open and prevent a sword from taking Shinpachi’s head off.

“Watch what you’re doing, stupid four eyes!”

“Hey!”

He realizes, later, that he’s already too close to Kagura, but he can’t help himself, she’s like a sister, like Anue-ue but louder and she doesn’t delude you with gentle smiles before punching you through the floor.

The day is beginning to draw to a close, the sun sinking and the Joui sinking with it, not defeated but backing off a bit, so the rabbits of the night don’t have such easy pickings when they manage to surround a general.

What in the world a general is doing in the outskirts instead of in the heart is something Shinpachi can’t quite fathom, and he ignores how the thought of cutting this man down, really getting that leg up over the Joui makes his palms sweat.

Except, the general isn’t alone.

That’s the first look at the Shiroyasha that Shinpachi gets, and there’s something oddly familiar in his face.

He very quickly learns why the man is referred to as a demon.

He has no set style, holds his blade with all the confidence of a man whose spent decades in a dojo but none of the grace, and cuts down over half of them in less than ten minutes.

Kagura has separated from him again at some point during the carnage, because there’s no way this can be referred to as a battle. It may be two against fifty but they don’t stand a chance.

Especially not when the Kihetai comes in from behind, and suddenly Shinpachi and Kagura are the only ones left.

The Shiroyasha moves towards Kagura, going for the biggest threat of course, what’s some scrawny teenager to a Yato, but Shinpachi finds himself there first, blade slipping from sweaty palms and umbrella his back.

Distantly, he notes that the blade isn’t cold. It’s hot with spilled blood, trails of crimson spilling down the blade and onto his neck, where it touches deep enough to scratch, but not much else.

“Guess we meet again after all,” Shiroyasha says, and then Kagura is firing, bullets streaking past Shinpachis shoulder and scraping his cheek, and then the Shiroyasha is gone.

Shinpachi takes a deep breath, wonders at being alive, and thinks of blood red eyes.

Shinpachi and Kagura return from that battle alone, leaning on eachother for support, and it’s like they’ve been blessed by the demon, after the touch of his blade none of the Kihetai spares them a glance, except in wonder but then Kaguras glare is more than enough to keep away prying eyes.

 

**Four**

 

They win the war, against all odds. Or maybe with the odds, but Shinpachi has come face to face with the Shiroyasha and something tells him that if that man hadn’t disappeared in those last months with the three Heavenly Kings then Shinpachi would be on the losing side.

But he’s gone, and Shinpachi returns to Edo victorious, with Kagura, and Otae greets them both with open arms.

She’s smiling, still, but there’s a wet glimmer on her cheeks. There’s a wet glimmer on all of their cheeks, but Shinpachi doesn’t feel victorious.

He doesn’t feel victorious, maybe, but the sense of relief is undeniable when he finally drifts to sleep on the floor of his own room.

It’s gone by the time he wakes up to the feeling of a hand touching his arm, and for a moment all he can think is the Shiroyasha has finally come back, and that the Jouishishi have rallied and taken their camp and he has to move now now now or else he’ll die and he’ll never see his family again, and then the smell of something burnt hits him, (burning buildings burning bodies burning clothes burning blood until there’s nothing else but harsh smoke and the stench) and Anue-ue calling his name.

“Shin-Chan,” she repeats, gently, though the ceramic plate is cracking under her grip, and Shinpachi feels sick as he realizes his sword is pressed to his own sisters neck.

It takes him a while to let himself near any blade again.

Kagura is much the same, but her nightmares always end up far more destructive, smashed walls and floors and there’s a hole or two in the ceiling.

Shinpachi doesn’t sleep easily anymore. The night is too loud, even when it’s silent, and it’s easier to get out of his bed and move.

Kagura takes to joining him on his midnight jaunts, stepping into the cool night air free of the stench of bloody and sweaty bodies and smoke, free of screams and crying, free of war.

Together they walk the streets of Edo, quiet and pale, grounding themselves in the buildings and reminding themselves that it’s real, it’s all real, that this is real and not a desperate fantasy cooked up by their minds.

On one such night, Shinpachi stumbles across a bar. It’s not the first, and certainly not the last, but there’s something that draws him to those red painted walls, and he risks a glance at the sign above the doorway.

‘Snack Otose’ does sound rather welcoming, and Shinpachi finds himself in the door almost before Kagura does. The lady behind the counter, an older woman with harsh lines on her face and a cigarette clamped between two fingers spares them a glance, then silently pours them both glasses.

It makes sense that she’s seen veterans before. Shinpachi doubts he looks like the person he was before the war, when he hadn’t seen the worst earth had to offer and then some, when there wasn’t thick bags under his eyes and the smell of smoke didn’t send him back where he didn’t want to be.

The alcohol is thick and bitter on his tongue, and Shinpachi drinks until the world is fuzzy. Kagura drinks maybe twice that, and together they are a very drunken mess, stumbling and vomiting, but he can’t remember what drove him to drink in the first place. His wallet is impossible to open, and then it’s open as if it was never closed in the first place and there’s coin strewn over the table.

“Th’r. Sh’ld be ‘nough,” he slurs, then hiccups giddily.

The lady gives him a pitying glance, and then the night fades out a bit. He remembers being asked where he lives, where Kagura lives, (“t’gether,” he mumbles, “m’ dojo.”) and there’s the feeling he saw someone very important, but the details are lost.

He wakes up with an awful hangover, and it conscious for all of three seconds before Anue-ue hits him hard enough to give his hangover a hangover.

“Shin-Chan!” She says reprimandingly, “what were you thinking, getting you and Kagura-Chan drunk? That nice man had to carry you home.”

Shinpachi briefly wonders who could have carried both him and Kagura home when he doesn’t remember telling anyone where he lived, but his head is splitting in two and Anue-ue is expecting an apology.

“‘M sorry. Jus’ wanted to forget, for a bit.”

He doesn’t catch her expression after that, hidden behind a wall of black, but he wakes up several hours later with a handwritten note from the lady at the bar, Otose, and a small pile of coin. 

‘Come back for drinks sometime,’ it reads, ‘I’ll be sure not to get you too drunk.’

 

**Five**

 

Shinpachi ends up going back for drinks. The old lady greets him and Kagura with a grudging smile, and warns them not to drink too much. Shinpachi notices the imprint of a fist left in the hard wood counter, and promises he won’t.

Halfway through his second glass, and Kaguras third, a rowdy group of Amanto push through the door, laughing at the Joui and pretending to be them, cowering and laughing some more.

Shinpachi frowns, and huddles away, tucking his shoulders and hunching over to his drink. Kagura looks like she wants to get up and say something, but the drink is strong and she only stands halfway before plopping back down, blinking furiously as if she could will the world clear. 

Otose doesn’t even blink, not when the Amanto demand free drinks, nor when they get angry. She just puffs cigarette smoke in their faces. “Get out. I don’t serve losers here.”

“Oi, oi, old lady, you dumb? We Amanto won the war!” One Amanto chuckles, and sways dangerously to the side. “Giv’ us free drinks, dumb old lady!”

“I said, I don’t serve losers here.” She replies.

“I know wha’ you said, wha’ I’m saying is give us free drin’s. It woul’ be a shame ta see this place shu’ down.”

Shinpachi is on the verge of standing, interrupting, paying for the drinks himself, anything to prevent too great a loss, when a third voice joins the mix.

“That’s why it won’t be,” it says, and Shinpachi knows that voice.

The Shiroyasha.

He has to step around the (unconscious, he can see their breathing, their not dead not dead not dead) bodies on the way out.

He doesn’t go back to Snack Otose for quite some time.

 

**Plus One**

 

He’s returning from a fourth failed job interview when the smell of baking hits his nose.

Unlike any other time, dread doesn’t immediately fill his stomach, because instead of the greasy, burnt smell of his sisters cooking, it actually smells kind of good.

Kagura is sitting cross legged at their kotatsu, when he enters, so she hasn’t suddenly picked up the knack for cooking. For a quick, painful second, he hopes it’s Hajime-Nii, or Otou-San, or even Okaa-san, before sliding the kitchen door open.

It’s the Shiroyasha.

“Sorry,” he says. “The old lady said I had to make it up to you for scaring you the other night. I thought a cake would be good, but I didn’t have any ingredients and the cakes at the store were too expensive.”

“That doesn’t mean you should bake it here!” Shinpachi shouts, and there is something hilarious in seeing a demon in an apron, as if he hasn’t seen the man rip an Amanto in half.

“Shin-Chan, it’s alright!” Anue-ue says, and it’s something that he didn’t notice her in the corner. “Unless he’s...” she trails off, and gives the Shiroyasha a more thorough lookover.

“No, no it’s alright, Anue-ue,” he hopes.

In any case, his reassurance brings a bit of a smile to the Shiroyasha’s face. He ends up sitting next to Anue-ue, unwilling to leave her alone in the room, and watches the Shiroyasha, bane of the Amanto, flee and pray his blade doesn’t find you, bake the damn nicest cake he’s ever seen.

Kagura ends up eating most of it.

“Thanks for back then,” Shiroyasha says. “Probably wouldn’t have been able to move that elephant myself, you know!” He chuckles.

Anue-ue laughs along, as does Kagura, and Shinpachi forces a wobbly smile, tries to forget the feeling of blood slick under his palms.

“Your sister says you’ve been job hunting,” he continues, “I have a little business of my own if you’re interested.”

Shinpachi can’t force words out of his dry throat, but the Shiroyasha seems to understand and passes him a slip of paper, the name of a business and address scrawled in messy ink. ‘Yorozuya Gin-San’.

He takes the job.

Meeting the Shiroyasha wasn’t the best thing that happened to Shinpachi, but meeting Sakata Gintoki was.

**Author's Note:**

> My next trick- vanishing back into the void for two years!


End file.
